To the Holy Mountain

Convinced that the living hesychast tradition he had failed to find in Ukraine and had met only in part in the Wallachian sketes survived, if anywhere, at its source, the young Paisius set out for Mount Athos, arriving (on the common reckoning) about 1746, at roughly the age of twenty-four. This file follows that decision and journey as the Autobiography records it, including his disappointment on arrival — that even on the Holy Mountain experienced elders of the prayer were hard to find, so that he began his Athonite years as a solitary — and sets up the long Athonite period treated in detail in the next section.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Russian-Moldavian (hesychast; Philokalic revival)

The Decision for Athos

The journey to the Holy Mountain was the logical terminus of the search that had carried Paisius out of the Kiev Mohyla Academy and through the sketes of Wallachia and Moldavia (see Seeking a Living Tradition). In the Danubian principalities he had found genuine skete life, real poverty and obedience, and elders who knew and commended the Jesus Prayer; what he had not found in full measure was a master of the contemplative prayer of the heart in the manner of the great hesychast Fathers, nor the body of reliable patristic texts that taught it (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone, Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature). For a seeker so formed, one destination remained: Athos, the Holy Mountain, the monastic republic where the hesychast controversy of the fourteenth century had been fought and won and where, if the tradition lived on anywhere in its fullness, it would be found (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.; Ware, introduction to The Philokalia, Faber).

The reasoning, in his own framing, is theological before it is geographical. Athos was for Paisius not merely an old and famous center of monks but the very ground of the hesychast inheritance — the place associated with St. Gregory Palamas and the conciliar vindication of the prayer of the heart, and therefore the most likely surviving reservoir of the living discipline he sought (Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality; Ware, introduction to The Philokalia, Faber). To go to the Mountain was to go to the source. The decision is of a piece with the whole logic of his wandering years: at each stage, when the place where he was could not supply the living transmission of inner prayer, he moved toward where it might still be found, and Athos was the last and highest of these moves (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.).

The Date of the Journey

The Autobiography and the disciple-tradition place his departure for and arrival at Athos in his early twenties, and the date is conventionally given as about 1746, when Paisius (born 1722) was roughly twenty-four. The date is widely repeated in the scholarship and is the figure used throughout this collection, but the precise year and the exact route are not fixed with certainty in the sources, and scholars allow a small range: [Disputed: the arrival on Athos is commonly given as c. 1746, following the chronology reconstructed by Chetverikov (*Starets Paisii Velichkovskii*, Eng. trans.) and reflected in Ware (introduction to *The Philokalia*, Faber); some accounts give 1746 specifically while others place the departure in the mid-1740s without pinning the year, and the exact itinerary — through the principalities and down to the Aegean coast — is not preserved in detail in the *Autobiography*]. The uncertainty is the ordinary uncertainty of an early-modern monastic biography reconstructed from a first-person memoir that is itself unfinished and from disciple-Lives composed later (on the source problem, see the master README and the Autobiography’s status as a primary witness). What the sources agree on is the broad fact: a young man in his early-to-mid twenties, already several years into a deliberate search, made his way to the Holy Mountain in the mid-1740s (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.; Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone).

The Journey Itself

Of the journey’s particulars the Autobiography preserves comparatively little, and what it preserves should not be inflated. Paisius traveled from the Danubian lands toward the Aegean and the peninsula of Athos — a long passage by the standards of an impoverished young monk, undertaken in the poverty and dependence on Providence that he had embraced as his rule of life (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone). The narrative emphasis in his own telling falls not on the hardships of travel but on the spiritual purpose driving him: the journey is presented as a pilgrimage of search, the outward movement of an inward hunger (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.). Where later devotional retellings supply colorful incident, the present account follows the principle of pinning claims to their earliest written attestation and does not import detail the primary source does not carry (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Arrival and Disappointment

The most important thing the Autobiography records about his arrival is, characteristically, a disappointment — the same pattern that had marked the Academy and the Kiev Caves Lavra. Paisius reached the Holy Mountain expecting to find living elders of the prayer of the heart who would receive him into obedience and lead him into the depths of the hesychast discipline. Instead, by his own testimony, he found that even on Athos such elders were not readily to be found: the Mountain in the mid-eighteenth century, though full of monks and monasteries, did not present him at once with a master of contemplative prayer ready to take him as a disciple (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone; Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.).

The significance of this disappointment can hardly be overstated, because it is the hinge of his whole subsequent achievement. If Paisius had found a flourishing school of living hesychasts on Athos, he might have become one more disciple in an unbroken line, and the history of the modern Philokalic revival would read very differently. What he found instead — a tradition present in the place and in the books but thinned in living transmission — forced him into the role of recoverer rather than mere inheritor (Ware, introduction to The Philokalia, Faber; Meyendorff, St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality). The very scarcity he lamented is what made him, in the end, the man who would gather the texts, correct the translations, and reconstitute the eldership for others (Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.).

Faced with this want of a guide, Paisius did not abandon the Mountain; he embraced its solitude. Unable to find the elder he sought, he began his Athonite life as a solitary, living in stillness (hesychia) and giving himself to prayer, fasting, and the reading of such patristic texts as he could obtain, in the eremitic poverty that the Holy Mountain afforded (Paisius, Autobiography, trans. Featherstone; Chetverikov, Starets Paisii Velichkovskii, Eng. trans.). This solitary beginning is itself a hesychast pattern — the seeker who, lacking a living master, takes the Fathers’ written counsels and the discipline of stillness as his school — and it set the conditions under which, in time, disciples would gather to him (on the monastic and eremitic forms at issue, see Monasticism).

Setting Up the Athonite Period

The arrival on Athos closes the wandering years and opens the central, formative chapter of Paisius’s life, which the next section treats in detail. On the Mountain he would pass from solitary to the center of a brotherhood: he would be sought out by other monks, drawn (despite his reluctance) into spiritual fatherhood, ordained, and established at the skete of the Prophet Elias, and he would undertake there the great labor of hunting down, copying, and beginning to correct the Greek patristic manuscripts of the hesychast tradition — the labor that would issue, decades later, in the Slavonic Dobrotolyubie (see The Hermit and the Brotherhood and Discovering the Greek Manuscripts). The disappointment of his arrival, in other words, was the seed of his vocation: the absence of living teachers on Athos turned the seeker into a founder, and the founder into the wellspring of the modern hesychast renewal (Ware, introduction to The Philokalia, Faber; on the eldership he would restore, Obedience and Spiritual Fatherhood).

References

Paisius Velichkovsky. The Life of Paisij Velyčkovs’kyj / Autobiography. Trans. J. M. E. Featherstone. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations vol. 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press / Ukrainian Research Institute, 1989. (His own first-person account of the decision for Athos, the journey from the Danubian lands, and his disappointment at the scarcity of living elders on the Mountain, where he began as a solitary.)
Chetverikov, Sergei. Starets Paisii Velichkovskii: His Life, Teachings, and Influence on Orthodox Monasticism. Trans. from the Russian. Belmont, MA: Nordland / St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (The standard critical biography; the chronology of his arrival on Athos c. 1746, his eremitic beginning, and the passage from solitary to elder.)
Ware, Kallistos. Introduction(s) to The Philokalia: The Complete Text, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979–. (Athos as the ground of the hesychast tradition, Paisius’s place in the Philokalic revival, and the thinned state of living transmission he encountered.)
Meyendorff, John. St Gregory Palamas and Orthodox Spirituality. Trans. Adele Fiske. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (Athos and the hesychast inheritance vindicated under Palamas, and the conditions of its eighteenth-century survival and renewal.)